Places of Philosophy

As the capital of a Mediterranean empire, Rome drew philosophers to it.

Elea was a Greek colony on the Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy, founded some thirty years before Parmenides was born, and it gave its name to the Eleatic school.

Athens was a leading centre of Greek philosophy for almost a thousand years.

Miletus, the most prosperous of the Greek cities of Ionia on the coast of Asia Minor, is where the written history of Greek philosophy is usually said to begin.

Salamanca's university, which grew from a cathedral school and received a royal charter from Alfonso IX of León in 1218, became the seat of the 'School of Salamanca'.

Córdoba, in al-Andalus, was the birthplace of three major thinkers of medieval Iberia.

Edinburgh was a centre of the Scottish Enlightenment.

Oxford's university produced the Franciscan philosophers Duns Scotus and William of Ockham in the late Middle Ages.

Zaragoza, on the Ebro, nurtured Muslim and Jewish philosophy in medieval Iberia.

London has been a centre of English philosophy since the seventeenth century.

Cambridge's colleges, Trinity especially, were home to leading figures of modern science and of analytic philosophy.

Paris has been a major centre of philosophy since the twelfth century.

Amsterdam, in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic, sheltered several unorthodox thinkers.

Trier was a Roman colony from the first century CE and, at the end of the third century, became one of the capitals of the Tetrarchy, seat of the Western Empire's junior emperor; UNESCO calls it a 'second Rome'.

Cologne was the German centre of Dominican learning in the Middle Ages and also housed a Franciscan studium generale.

Basel, on the Rhine, combined a university with busy printing houses such as Johann Froben's.

The University of Turin has been a home for logic, Marxist thought and semiotics.

Freiburg im Breisgau was a centre of phenomenology between the world wars.

Frankfurt am Main gave its name to the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

The University of Heidelberg was a centre of German social thought, psychiatry and philosophy in the twentieth century.

The University of Marburg was the base of Hermann Cohen, who taught there for almost four decades.

The University of Göttingen joined mathematics and philosophy in the early twentieth century.

Florence, a merchant republic and later a grand duchy, shaped Italian thought from Dante to Galileo.

In the 1790s and 1800s the small university town of Jena was the main centre of German Idealism.

Padua's university, in the Venetian Republic, drew students and teachers from across Europe.

Copenhagen was the lifelong home of Søren Kierkegaard.

Berlin, the Prussian capital, was a centre first of the Jewish and German Enlightenment and then of idealist philosophy.

Naples, the great city of southern Italy, was home to a university and to powerful religious houses.

Vienna, capital of the Habsburg monarchy, was home to two influential movements of modern philosophy.

Königsberg, near the south-eastern shore of the Baltic and today the Russian city of Kaliningrad, is inseparable from Immanuel Kant.

Between the two world wars the University of Warsaw brought together the logicians Jan Łukasiewicz, Stanisław Leśniewski and Alfred Tarski.

St Petersburg, on the Baltic at the mouth of the Neva, was a city of writers and radicals in late imperial Russia.

Marrakesh was the seat of the Almohad rulers who patronised philosophy in the twelfth century.

Fez, in northern Morocco, links several lives in the western Islamic world.

Algiers, the capital of Algeria under French colonial rule, shaped two very different French-language philosophers.

Hippo Regius, a port of Roman North Africa on the coast of what is now eastern Algeria, was Augustine's home for the last four decades of his life.

Founded by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE, Alexandria became a leading centre of Hellenic scholarship and science.

Cairo and Fustat, now part of it, were a meeting place of Muslim and Jewish learning and later of modern Islamic reform.

Damascus drew philosophers, mystics and jurists across five centuries.

As the capital of the Abbasid caliphs, Baghdad was a centre of the movement that translated Greek philosophy and science into Arabic.

Basra, founded as an Arab garrison town near the head of the Gulf, became what the Encyclopaedia Iranica calls the intellectual crossroads of the Islamic world in the eighth to tenth centuries.

Rayy, an old Persian city near modern Tehran, gave its name to two major thinkers, both known as al-Razi.

Isfahan hosted three phases of Persian philosophical and scientific life.

Nishapur, a great city of Khorasan, was a centre of theology, science and Sufism.

Bukhara, seat of the Samanid court, was where Ibn Sina grew up and was educated.

Lhasa, with its ancient Jokhang temple, was the religious heart of Tibetan Buddhism.

Lahore was the intellectual home of Muhammad Iqbal, the poet and philosopher whom Britannica calls the greatest twentieth-century poet to write in Urdu.

In the Kashmir Valley, around the year 1000, Abhinavagupta wrote some of the most studied works of Sanskrit philosophy and aesthetics.

Delhi has been a centre of learning across several eras.

Kanchipuram, a temple city of south India not far from modern Chennai, was a seat of Vedānta learning.

Varanasi, on the Ganges, is one of India's sacred cities.

Nalanda, in what is now Bihar, was a major centre of Buddhist monastic learning in India.

Navadvipa in Bengal became the second great home of Navya-Nyāya, the 'new' school of Indian logic and epistemology.

Calcutta was a centre of modern Indian thought and reform.

Chang'an, the Tang capital on the site of modern Xi'an, was where much Buddhist learning from India was translated into Chinese.

Luoyang, on the Luo river in the Yellow River plain, served as a capital for several Chinese courts.

Mount Lu rises south of the Yangtze in northern Jiangxi.

Beijing, capital of the Qing empire, drew scholars from across China.

Qufu, in Shandong, is honoured as the home of Confucius, who taught in the state of Lu.

The countryside around Andong, in south-eastern Korea, was the home of Yi Hwang (Toegye), one of the two great Neo-Confucian philosophers of Joseon Korea.

Kyoto, still Japan's new imperial capital when the emperor Saga summoned Kūkai there in 809, hosted Buddhist, Confucian and modern philosophy in turn.

Mount Hiei, above Kyoto, was the centre of the Tendai school and the training ground of the Buddhist reformers of Japan's Kamakura period.

Kamakura became the seat of Japan's first military government in 1180 and a centre of new Buddhist movements.

Edo, the shogun's capital, and the modern city of Tokyo that grew from it have been centres of Japanese philosophy since the seventeenth century.

Timbuktu, on the southern edge of the Sahara, was an intellectual and spiritual capital of West Africa.

Accra, the capital of Ghana, became a meeting point for Pan-African politics and academic African philosophy.

In Johannesburg, in September 1906, Mohandas Gandhi led a mass meeting of Indians who pledged to resist the Transvaal's new ordinance requiring the registration of its Indian population.

Kampala's Makerere University, known in the mid-twentieth century as Makerere University College of East Africa, educated a generation of East African writers and thinkers.

The University of California at Berkeley drew logicians, philosophers of science and philosophers of language from the 1940s.

Stanford University in California has housed philosophers, economists and educators.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) has trained and employed many analytic philosophers.

Mexico City has been a centre of philosophy in the Americas since the colonial era.

The University of Chicago became a centre of pragmatism and later of émigré philosophy.

The University of Notre Dame, in northern Indiana, has been a home for the philosophy of religion.

Ann Arbor, Michigan, is home to the University of Michigan.

Detroit is home to Wayne State University, whose philosophy department employed Edmund Gettier and Alvin Plantinga in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, gathered philosophers of science, logicians and theorists of rational choice in the later twentieth century.

The University of Toronto has been a centre for philosophy, media theory and psychology.

Charlottesville, Virginia, is the seat of the University of Virginia.

Lima, the capital of Peru, was the base of two influential twentieth-century Latin American thinkers.

Washington, D.C., the capital of the United States, has been home to reformers and philosophers.

Philadelphia's universities have hosted philosophers from several traditions.

Princeton, New Jersey, has been home to many analytic philosophers since the mid-twentieth century.

New Brunswick, New Jersey, is the main campus of Rutgers University.

New York became a refuge and a forum for philosophy in the twentieth century.

Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, trained and employed many twentieth-century philosophers.

Providence, Rhode Island, is home to Brown University.

Boston and neighbouring Cambridge, home of Harvard University, were an early centre of American philosophy.

Fort-de-France, capital of Martinique, was Aimé Césaire's base for most of his life.

Buenos Aires has been a meeting point for Latin American and European thought.

São Paulo's universities have hosted logicians, physicists and educators.

The University of Adelaide brought together two philosophers of mind in the early 1950s.

Melbourne has been a centre of Australian philosophy since the mid-twentieth century.

Canberra, Australia's capital, is the seat of the Australian National University.

The University of Sydney was the home of John Anderson, who held its Challis chair of philosophy.